I want it NOW!We like to have what we want right now. Not later, now, and we don’t want to wait! Think aspirin and fast food. Think credit cards. Think how well you spend cash and how low your savings account is. While its evolution’s fault: hunt, eat, sleep and do it again tomorrow or perish, it does not serve us well in modern life. We do not have to “Do it now or die!” anymore, but we still follow that instinct. If we follow this instinct, nothing is ever fast enough and when it is, satisfaction is elusive.The amount of frustration for some grows to nuclear proportions when we have to go into delay mode for any reason. We pace. We yell. We feel like we might explode. We act like hornets in a jar. Most of us don’t even know why we have a need to have things and results right away and chalk it up as a character flaw or a lack of patience. For those few human beings that have patience, we look at them as if they are either some kind of saint or genetic deviant. We simply are instinctively wired to have things now and in doing so it hurts us in many ways: jobs, clothes, food, health, exercise, cars, partners, friends, homes, money, security, vacations, relationships, marriage, children . . . and the list is endless.Since we aren’t wired naturally to delay gratification and think in longer time frames, we can also sabotage our own success. We contaminate our best laid plans with toxic, short term thinking. We can easily get frustrated and today spend the money we’ve saved or demand to know where the relationship is headed. Then, when our savings dissolve and the relationship breaks up, we wonder what happened.
- We want a return without having to invest.
- We want a reward, without having to do the work.
- We want performance without preparation.
- We want security without risk.
- We want action without a plan.
- We want instant gratification without having to delay gratification.
Are you starting to see the picture?There is nothing wrong with instant gratification as long as you keep it in its proper place.Giving in to the need for instant gratification as a general rule of life lowers our quality of life. It adds frustration, unhappiness, doubt and stress, the negative emotions that drain us. The kinds of results that you desire, especially in both financial and relationship success, are created over longer time frames. While we would all like to have some magical dust, the fact is, they are built over time.You can rewire your habits to delay certain gratification and it does not have to be boring, difficult or necessarily hard. As you make the switch, make the time moving towards your goal fun. Enjoy the journey! Each step, each day, is an accomplishment to celebrate! Eliminate words like “work, build, can’t have and wait” from your vocabulary.A good rule of thumb is to work towards something a year in the future. Pick just one thing then, go after it! Once you begin to see the world from this “invest first” point of view, your results will increase dramatically. The financial security grows; the relationship becomes solid and secure. Make no mistake here, the level of commitment and drive you have will get you great results in your life.